Professional product reviewer

Ad Sense Sucks

I have a YouTube account, which I monetized back in October. For those that don’t know, you can monetize your YouTube videos by allowing ads. You get a small payment for every 1,000 views. Over time it adds up, then when you hit $100, you can get a check sent to you. However, that has not been my experience to date.

I hit my $100 threshold in December. I was very excited. But in reading further, YouTube does not pay you. Instead you have to get an Ad Sense account, and then THEY will pay you at the $100 threshold. Ok, fine. So I signed up for an Ad Sense account. Ad Sense only showed $60 in my account, which was not what YouTube showed. After poking around the Ad Sense forums, it seemed like the consensus is that Ad Sense’s data lags behind YouTube, and furthermore they only pay out at certain times of the month. Be patient is the advice. Ok fine.

Finally the day arrived, they showed a $122 balance. I could get paid! But wait! When poking around more on Ad Sense trying to find out when and how that would happen, I discover I needed to submit some information to the IRS before they would issue payment. Ok fine. I enter my information, it’s not too hard – they want your name, SSN, address and things like that. Nothing hard at all, I was pleasantly surprised. I enter my information and submit…. and I get an error. Says IRS could not verify my information and it would be manually checked. Then a day later an email arrives, saying my request was denied. I went through this several times, all with the same result. I tried adding a middle initial. Same thing. I was not given a reason why they would not accept my information, and no help to fix things so they would accept it.

So now I’m very frustrated, and the forums are not helpful with this question. I need to speak with (or at least email) an Ad Sense customer service rep. Guess what? You can’t. You can’t because no such people exist, according to the forum I consulted. They do not have people on staff. You have to rely on the forums. They are the only company in the world that does not have a help desk. And they are screwing me out of money. And this is why they suck.

So if you are thinking about monetizing your YouTube account, be prepared for frustration, and general suckiness.

UPDATE- a week after I posted this, the IRS magically accepted my information from Ad Sense and they cut me a check (which has not arrived as of this update). I don’t know why suddenly they accepted my information after the 30th time entering it the same way, but I guess the lesson to all is just keep persevering. Ad Sense came up a notch, but I am still shocked that they don’t have any customer service to speak of beyond user forums.